• Hotmail User

  Where is the “send as” functionality? I don’t see how to enable that.

  • lkachun9129

    You have to do some settings first~~

    Go to “Options”->”Sending/receiving email from other accounts”
    Add your email address under “You can send mail from these accounts”

    Now, you can select the send account when composing the mail~!

    • Hotmail User

      Thanks for the instructions, but I already did that. The instructions says: ‘When you compose a new message, you can choose to send it from any of the following accounts. Your recipients may see: “From myemail@live.com on behalf of name@example.com” ‘ The question about was: “When will Hotmail support “Send As” functionality? “Send on behalf” is not good enough.” I don’t see a “Send As” option thought they say it’s available.

• http://techAU.tv techau

  I was going to comment but.. no comment.

• MsRose

  So basically…’Can’t talk about that yet’.�

  Wow, talk about standoffish and aloof. I’ll stick with Gmail thanks.

  • john

    So they have no current plans to adopt a more metro design…. Ya, I agree, I will stick with Gmail. I tried to go back to hotmail, but it looks pretty awful at the moment.

• Anonymous

  Can’t believe they wouldn’t even consider a Hotmail rebrand… laughing at it is a bad mindset… if you want to be the best you should be willing to seriously consider the pros and cons of all aspects of your product or “service”

  don’t know if a rebrand would help or hurt but should at least be thought about:

  pros: more modern name (the same users who abandonded Hotmail because of the cruft you are trying to fix now might be won over by yes the features you are working on but also by the appearance (aka new name) of modernity

  new name would offer the potential for more synergy between products. SkyMail and SkyDrive? SkyDocs? SkyPhotos? SkyMusic? I don’t know where the synergy should start or end… but there is potential… if Windows LIVE (seach) had the same features as Google… it still wouldn’t matter… but if you rename it something modern like Bing then it might stand a chance

  • Avatar Roku

    Docs, Photos, and Music can all remain under Skydrive and don’t really need new “sky” names.

    I do find Skymail, Skydrive and Skype to be a somewhat compelling and convenient naming scheme for the headings on Live.com. It would almost seem as though Microsoft had planned this all along.

    Your point is well taken about renaming Live.com to Bing.com, but remember that Hotmail is still the most popular web mail service in the world with hundreds of millions of users every month. Abandoning the brand of the top service is a lot more risky than abandoning a brand that has never been successful.

• Mario Albertico

  Wow, is there anything else besides “not now” or “we’ll get back to you” in this? They seem so confident that people will stick or switch to Hotmail just because of the supposed back-end work, but they don’t acknowledge how competitors (ahem, Gmail) have the brand power to succeed even if their products aren’t as good.

• jnt

  I hate to be cynical, but this sounded like an interview with a front office sales person who just knows what they’ve been told to say, and nothing more…

  One arguable point – the “send as” feature does *not* send as, it still says “on behalf of” in certain clients.  It does not actually use the smtp servers of the other carrier like Gmail does (not a gmail fanboy, just the best example I could think of for this feature). �

  Also, that last paragraph felt like a backhanded, very subtle dig at gmail, that reeked of insecurity!

  • jnt

    To respond to my arguable point… the “send as” feature hides it in web-based clients, but Outlook still shows “blablabla@live.com on behalf of youremail@whatever.com” – which again seems to point to it not actually using the smtp server…

    • Anonymous

      I was told by the guys that the “Sending/receiving email from other accounts” option will send mail through the alternative domain’s servers and therefore it is “send as” and not “on behalf”.

      • jnt

        Oh I know that’s what they told you – what I’m saying is that’s not true… whether the guys you talked to knew it or not – it still comes from something@live.com on behalf of whatever, even if it hides it in certain headers.  I wasn’t trying to bash on your interview at all and appreciate the info you shared – it was just frustrating to read b/c it felt like listening to a salesperson who doesn’t know all the inner-workings of what’s really going on.

• Access

  Are these employees stupid or something? I am sorry but what is this answer concerning screen reader users? Totally ignorant! People who use screen readers are blind or visually impaired. YES the screen reader is and is not expected to be provided by Hotmail. YES, the screen reader is a piece of software that blind users use to access Hotmail. And YES and OF COURSE, Internet Explorer 9 should and does support most popular screen readers, even though, NOOOO, the screen reader is baught separately and does not come with IE9. However, what does this have to do with Hotmail “supporting” and I repeat “supporting” screen readers? For the software developers who are not ignorant, screen reader support does not involve providing a screen reader. It involves using and/or adding the right HTML tags to your pages to make them more accessible to screen reader users. An example, the most obvious one, is to label using the HTML alt attribute all the images so that blind users can know what they are about. And yet, the Hotmail Sign-in page (which by the way takes ages to load), contains two pictures “images/seesweep” and “images/sign_up” which are not labeled. I am giving anexample now, don’t take this to be the only issue that has to be considered. The answer they gave here is so bad I am thinking to publicize it to see the laughs I would get from the community of blind people in response.

  • Anonymous

    Do bear in mind I might have misunderstood the question and/or answer. They did seem to know what screen readers are.

• http://revanmj.pl/ Michał Jakubowski

  Maybe EAS is better, but it is supported only on mobile devices. On PCs you have to use POP3 so I think that “old” IMAP would be better here …

• http://thetechnologycafe.com Sam Z Best!

  I like the new features such as clean sweep etc�

  http://thetechnologycafe.com/hotmail-reinvented-with-new-features-will-you-give-it-another-try/

• http://macrosofter.wordpress.com/ quikboy

  Eh. A good PR would have been to give some sort of answer to 75% of these question, and maybe a no comment on the 25%, but this interview hasn’t really reassured me anything.

  I get why they consider putting new features is more of a priority than design work, but is it that hard to put out a new theme? Metro, is Microsoft’s design style going forwards, and it’d be nice if their web services would actually look and feel similar to what the rest of the company is doing.

• Paio-gi

  “British English” ??? Seriously? TBH, this is totally unecessary, I can see the point of US-English or the like, though.

• Anonymous

  Thank you Michael Gillett for asking the Hotmail team about
  custom domains and especially the rebranding of Hotmail.

  IMHO, a rebranding isn’t laughable but should be a serious consideration.

  As I posted on Gillett’s previous article, there’s a stigma
  with the name Hotmail. �

  The name Hotmail is mostly associated
  with unreliability and spam, due to past problems.

  The name Hotmail itself (the Live name also) is a hindrance to Microsoft’s efforts.

  A simple definition search online for “hot” results in definitions you usually
  don’t want serious email to be associated with.

  I’ve read/seen people and companies that avoid the Hotmail name.

  Having “hot” in the name, hinders Hotmail to not even be taken seriously
  by people or companies.

  The definitions for “hot” in Urban Dictionary, are what Microsoft should definitely avoid.

  All the hard effort and changes Microsoft have made and will make is all for
  nothing if people avoid to use it at all because of the name Hotmail.

  If Microsoft seriously intends to compete with Gmail, a change, a rebranding
  will spur interests and usage.

  It’s all in public perception, Hotmail is on the losing end because of many aspects.

• tk

  One more vote here for Skymail!  I’d change my addresses in a heartbeat.
  The point is, MS is kicking butt in terms of quality these days.  Hotmail itself is getting much better (better than Gmail for filers like me), WP7 is a thing of beauty, Kinect has amazing potential, and Win8 will make for the best tablets out there.
  But the Hotmail branding has got to go.  It belongs in the late 90′s.  Skymail would fit so well with SkyDrive and Skype!  Match made in heaven.  I am a big Skype fan btw, so switching to Gmail would be a mistake, since Skype and Hotmail will eventually be integrated.

  Having a SkyMail address associated to my Skype account would make me very, very happy, and it would become my main e-mail account in a minute.

• shanshah

  my name is  shanshah

• Anonymous

  Exchange ActiveSync is a mobile only protocol, IMAP works across the desktop and mobile platforms.

  You’re stuck to using Outlook or Windows Live Mail and because Hotmail doesn’t support IMAP, all you get on MAC OS X is POP3. POP3! Seriously Microsoft?

  Microsoft at the very least need to release a Hotmail Connector for MAC OS X. Gmail/Contacts/Calendar works natively in MAC OS X’s Mail app. I think it was added with Leopard.

• http://www.guillaumeb.com/ GuillaumeB

  Yeh that was probably the marketing manager or something. I usually tend to avoid those. Anyways, the send as option, I believe would be to replicate what gmail does with Activesync, that is, enable people to send email with a previously validated alternate email from the mobile client. That would be a killer, but then again, Google did it, Microsoft didn’t.

  Anyways, I guess i’ll be back when they will actually have “something” to announced

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